Resource Library

38 Results Found

Trustee Articles
As health care organizations become more complex and diverse, their governance requires individuals with a range of knowledge, skills and behaviors that can address the needs and challenges of these evolving enterprises. As their organizations mature, effective boards update how their members are selected, often moving away from informal, relationship based board composition to a more intentional, competency-based process.
Trustee Articles
In many ways, women are on the front line in health care — as consumers, employees and family caretakers. They possess firsthand knowledge of community health issues and needs. They can bring an informed perspective to health care and other community organizations about where to focus resources to have the greatest impact.
Trustee Articles
A decade ago, BoardSource, an organization supporting nonprofit boards, developed a well known list of aspirational principles of governance. For us they still ring true: “mission driven,” “ethos of transparency,” “compliance with integrity.”
Board Policies
Governance responsibilities today are so significant that board members must bring more than commitment to the mission and interest in serving. As William Bowen writes, every trustee should bring a “specific competence or experience needed on the board.” This sample provides a board policy statement on competency-based recruitment, election and re-election of board members. Use it to customize a process for your board.
Board Policies
This sample provides a board policy statement on competency-based recruitment, election and re-election of board members. Use it to customize a process for your board.
Trustee Articles
In July 2011, five national health associations jointly urged hospital and health system leaders to take three steps to help eliminate health disparities and improve quality of care. These steps called for increasing...
Trustee Articles
Most boards I know were built by recruiting business leaders, physicians and clergy, and it’s important to have broad community representation among trustees. Increasingly, however, boards are recruiting new members by using a skills-based approach aligned with the organization’s strategic needs, including the need for information technology expertise. This is where “digital directors” come in.
Trustee Articles
Recruiting board members is a challenge for every hospital and health system, but the task is particularly difficult in small communities. At Benefits Health System, Great Falls, Mont., our pool of candidates is largely limited to the city’s 60,000 residents, despite the fact that we are the tertiary referral center for a population of 250,000 across nearly 40,000 square miles of rural Montana.
Trustee Articles
Given the sweeping changes in health care, forward-thinking hospitals, systems and medical centers are carefully evaluating board member succession and recruitment. The challenging environment in which these organizations operate requires strong, knowledgeable boards whose members have deep insights into the field and a fundamental understanding of business, management practices and how to compete in a highly competitive market.
Trustee Articles
Bringing new members onto the board has its challenges. In small or rural communities, the pool of potential trustees is often limited, with desirable candidates already serving on multiple boards. Even in bigger urban areas, it sometimes seems the same people rotate on and off the boards of larger community organizations — the Rotary Club, the chamber of commerce, the hospital.
Trustee Articles
Health care organization trusteeship is getting more complicated and challenging as pressures to improve quality and safety, reduce costs, increase transparency and accountability, and use changing and evermore-expensive technology converge. At the same time, hospitals face increasing competition from unexpected sources for patients and for professionals in critical disciplines.
Trustee Articles
The 2007 report of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Health Care Governance focused on building a foundation for exceptional governance and included several tools and practices to help boards move from good to great performance.
Trustee Articles
Elaine Zablocki found that recruiting more minorities and women to the board takes new ways of thinking about, recruiting and orienting directors.
Trustee Articles
As governing boards seek greater diversity in ethnicity, race, and gender, they face a significant challenge: how to successfully recruit women and minorities with pertinent professional backgrounds and governance skills, while other not-for-profits and corporations seek directors from the very same pool of candidates.
Trustee Articles
The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.
Trustee Articles
From a Community Multi-Site Hospital with a Diverse Community Note: the following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.  To read more...
Trustee Articles
The current challenges of healthcare governance have given rise to a growing debate about the issue of term limits for hospital and health organization board members. Are term limits a restrictive practice that leads to the loss of badly needed board talent, or are they an essential way of keeping boards from becoming stale and ineffective?
Position Descriptions
The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.